Parenting through a child's first gut punch loss
So last night I took my sons to the Frozen Four semi-final. Like prince Siddartha's parents, I had tried to shield them (particularly my 9 yo who is very into sports) from the pain of sports fandom that I had grown up with. Fate had intervened in the interim; my hometown Eagles won the Superbowl (I still can't believe I'm writing that) and UM beat OSU in football (tbh, I can't believe I'm writing that either). So, yeah, they had not really felt the pain yet.
I knew that there was a non-zero chance things could go very badly. I tried to prep them by explaining one-game playoff hockey; I showed them the 1994 Colorado football game, the 1993 UM-UNC championship game and the UM hockey tourney losses over the years (the lowlights of my time in Ann Arbor and beyond). I even mentioned all of this to them when I asked if he and his friend we took (son of alums and crazy fan as well) if they really wanted to stay for overtime. To their credit, and eventual pain, they did.
After the game my eldest was in shock and acted in a lot of ways that I'm sure he is glad was not recorded. This morning he was still in a really bad place.
I ended up reading a piece to him I wrote for the Boston Globe in 2014 when he was 2 about what I hoped to teach him about fandom. I've posted the text from it below for those interested.
Anyway, the upshot is that whether it was listening to my hopes that he would be a better fan than I, or something else, he pivoted to talking about all the fun things about the game, including new cheers (Goalie!, Sieve!, Goalie!, Sieve!, We want moooooooore goals!) and even smiling when saying "that was a real gut punch, wasn't it?, as if the magnitude of it was a kind of badge of honor.
I hope that for the rest of the fanbase, and especially those with kids, are doing okay this mo(u)rning. My boys are again excited about our first big house trip in the fall, and hope to catch a game at Yost, even if many of their heroes will be playing on rinks elsewhere.
Are We Teaching our Kids the right way to be fans?
FIRST, AN admission: I am a Philadelphia Eagles fan living in Boston. And this is not a casual loyalty to my hometown team but a deep devotion. There remains a raw, gnawing pain in my gut whenever Super Bowl XXXIX comes up. I can tolerate Tom Brady — but only because he happened to play at University of Michigan, my alma mater. Yes, between these pro and college football allegiances, I spend most of each autumn stewing over other people playing a game on television.
If I toiled alone in my fuming, that'd be one thing. But this fall there'll be a new addition to my couch on the weekend: my 2-year-old son.
My boy "gets" things now. He gleans emotional context from the cues given off by his peers, his caregivers, and his parents. He knows when he is going to the doctor, or when a car trip is ending in ice cream. As a new season kicks off this month, he'll be watching Dada watching football, too — but what will he get from that?
Here's what I want him to see: the joy of witnessing superior athletic skill; respect for the teamwork and sportsmanship needed for success at the highest level of the game; camaraderie with other fans who share a hometown, an alma mater, or a community. At its best, sport should be one of life's great metaphors, filled with lessons to be learned about hard work and the role of chance, winning and losing, and sportsmanship regardless of the outcome. I think that, like most children who enjoy sports, my son's initial tendency will be toward experiencing competition through that lens.
What I worry about is letting the more negative parts of fandom — some of which I definitely see within myself — take root. Enjoying the misery of others has always been a part of sports. The problem is that, more and more often, I am also not alone in taking greater pleasure in seeing rivals, and their fans, lose than in my own team's victories. Do we really want to teach our kids that name-calling, nastiness, and bullying are wrong — unless, that is, it's in the name of "supporting" our team?
I'm not the first person to note that sports rivalries share much in common with other forms of tribalism throughout human history. What else would explain how I can easily choose one team to cheer for in an English Premier League match between two cities I have no ties to, a game that has zero impact on American soccer. I just need the opportunity to root for one group against another. Psychologists call it "basking in reflected glory" — when we seek to associate ourselves with a team and pretend that its success somehow elevates us as fans even though we only watched.
Of course, when one of the teams involved actually is "my" team, things deteriorate even more quickly.
I find myself engaged in real and imaginary vitriolic exchanges with people — including my friends — about college and pro football. I can’t deny this trigger within me, where a TV sporting event can and does conjure up intense negative emotion, which I can’t turn off. Jerseys become an object of my own emotional projections or, as Jerry Seinfeld once observed, laundry I am rooting for.
And when my team does lose, I rationalize it by finding alternative ways that it is — and, by extension, I am — superior. When Ohio State beats Michigan — which has happened a lot lately — my first thought is not simply disappointment or grumpiness but an overwhelming desire to find some way, any way, to insult the opposing fan base, regardless of how little it has to do with the game played on the field. Though at my lesser moments I may not care to admit it, the relative academic rankings of the rival schools really have close to nothing to do with what happens on a football field in late November.
Not infrequently, however, I also find myself angry, frustrated, and just plain mean when rooting for — and especially against — teams even in sports that I don't usually follow. Watching the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in the 2003 American League Championship Series is understandably emotional, but the 2012 Ryder Cup? I probably don't watch more than an hour of golf in a year, and yet I found myself despairing angrily as the US team choked away the title.
Obviously I'm not the only person to succumb to these tendencies. Examples abound from the offbeat and sad, like the poisoning of special trees at Auburn by a disturbed Alabama fan, to fan injuries and even deaths resulting from fights at sporting matches here and abroad. In the past, when I had no connection to these teams or leagues, I might shake my head and softly laugh at "crazy SEC fans" or "football hooligans," for those folks are clearly unhinged and not like me. The truth, however, is that I see the roots of some of these disturbing outcomes in my own emotional reactions to events.
Yet being a good sport is becoming increasingly difficult. While there have always been unruly fans, today's ever-expanding "sports-industry complex" is making matters worse.
Earl Warren, the former chief justice, famously declared that he read the sports pages before the news in order to read of man's accomplishments before his failures. Modern sports media, though, thrives on missteps and shortfalls. Controversy brings millions of viewers to television channels like ESPN and thousands of hits to sports websites. Twenty-four hours a day, the most intense fans can weigh in, stoking a never-ending flame war (see James, LeBron) of comments by haters, trolls, and other unpleasant web denizens.
For live events, team owners face a delicate balance of taking money from the most rabid fans while ensuring they don't cross the line into family-unfriendly territory. NFL ads focus on excited fans anxiously watching a last-minute play, cheering a win, or heartbroken over a loss. The angry fan exploding never appears — though it is often not hard to find him at the game. Like the alcohol industry, sports teams probably don't want to enable people whose addiction has gotten out of control. Yet the reality remains it's those individuals filling their coffers, leaving little incentive to keep sports civil.
What's comforting, though, is how different my experience as a fan is from that of being an athlete myself. Thinking again of my son, I want him to know the fun and satisfaction I feel when I shoot hoops or throw around the football in the backyard. When I play, almost all of my aggression and emotion is directed toward the physical activity. Sure, I may get into it with someone who calls touch fouls (or dishes out inappropriately hard ones) in a pick-up game. Yet, more often than not, in the exhaustion I feel at the end, I shake hands with my competition and look forward to playing again.
And that's what I want to teach my son about being a fan, too. To respect those who choose to root against his interests, to imagine being the person in the other laundry. I'm going to start by reminding myself of that goal every day as I head back over to the Eagles/Michigan blogs I read obsessively. I can't stop being a fan, but hopefully I can be a better one.
This was an excellent diary, and many of your points are well-taken. I never really had to worry about emotional inheritances, though, as neither my father nor my daughters have any real interest in sports.
I admit that I too have succumbed far too often to the dopamine hit of schadenfreude. It's just natural when living in enemy territory. I'm not proud of this fact, but I'm also loathe to let it go. Sports, and especially football, are sublimated warfare. You win, they lose. Agony and ecstasy. And I'll be damned if I ever respect a Buckeye's fandom.
Now, where did I leave my Twitter account??
This was an awesome read. This is an excellent perspective as as sports fan. I remember the moment that changed me as a sports fan with children. I was watching The Horror in my living room, and Michigan missed the field goal for the win and I watched Appalachian St celebrate on the block M at mid-field. Some simply horrid words came out of my mouth. My hat went flying across the room. I turned and saw the look of horror and distress on my daughters face as they were sitting on the couch and made the choice right there that this is just a game that I am watching and it doesn't really affect me at all.
I still get upset when Michigan teams lose, but I don't swear, and I don't throw things. I don't let the results of the game dictate the kind of day that I am going to have following the game. Now I have 4 grandkids and the oldest has been watching games and cheering along with me, and when I don't get the results we want, we move on. If I can teach them anything in life, I hope to be able to show them how to temper immediate emotional reactions, not just in sports, but in life.
April 10th, 2022 at 12:56 PM ^
I live an hour from App State, and had invited my App State alum neighbors/friends over to listen (I didn't have the channel required to watch). Their kids were friends with my kids. In short, I kept it together, but it took all my strength not to kick them out screaming as they jumped up and down in my kitchen. Still kinda makes me sick thinking of it, but I guess I can be proud of the way I handled it.
Edit: and now my son is a freshman at App. I'd still root for UM in a rematch, and I bet he would, too. At his request, we made the trip up for the UM-OSU game this year. That was as good as it gets :).
He cannot get in BPONE for Hockey, that is what football is for.
That was a great, deep read. But, to keep my answer short and light — he’ll eventually just get numb to it like we all have and it won’t affect him anymore the next day. That eventually takes about 30 years though. Then it gets masked with the acceptance that Michigan will always be really damn good at almost every sport but almost never be the actual best in the end. Joy.
Great read. Lovely sentiment.
I definitely don't get as caught up in the emotional ups and downs like I did when I wore a younger man's clothes.
That being said, I can't get too far past my disdain for all things Green & White and Scarlet & Gray.
I've got a current U of M junior and an HS senior who was admitted to U of M just a few weeks ago.
Given the current state of college admissions, there was a good chance the younger one might've ended up in East Lansing. (Although neither applied to OSU; just couldn't do it.)
Unlike some of my more gracious friends whose kids have attended the "enemy" university, I just couldn't imagine myself in a green and white "MSU Dad" t-shirt. Would've felt wrong. Obviously very happy for my daughter for obtaining her dream...and happy I wasn't faced with trying to figure out what to do.
I've got a treasured photos of me with my friend who's a very dedicated OSU fan (but not alumnus). He's wearing his Maize and Blue "Michigan Dad" t-shirt at his daughter's HS graduation party. I have him a lot of credit for wearing the shirt...along with a smile!
Lest you think otherwise, I would certainly be supportive of my kids...regardless of the university they attend. My sentiments are geared to actually wearing MSU/OSU attire.
Thanks again for sharing, Niels!
I don't remember specifics, but as a kid I went to every home Michigan game from the age of 5, so I witnessed my share of MIchigan gut-punch losses.
My dad basically said "Feel bad today, maybe feel bad tomorrow. But the get over it because in the end it's just a game"
I kind of try to live by that. I might feel crappy about it for 36 hours or so, but then you have to move on. If you let your sports fandom ruin your life you are doing it wrong.
Great read and thanks for sharing!
I was definitely one of those kids growing up who would be despondent after a Michigan loss, and probably carried that over into my early 20s. I never really had an 'aha' moment that I got beyond that, but just the slow realization that god doesn't answer prayers for sport outcomes (and there are just as many fans of the other team praying for divine intervention for their team too), that the kids and coaches on the other team have worked just as hard and have the same intangible 'right' to win as my team, etc. Basically just that my team is no more special in the eyes of the universe than any other team, and ultimately seeing these kids playing hard, playing competitive games is what's most fun.
Part of being a mega sports fan is eating the loss. Consuming so much doo doo makes victories that much tastier. If the goal is the championship, then most of the time we as fanatics are going to be disappointed. But every step along the way is enjoyed.
I would also add that if victory is essential for being a passionate fan, what kind of fan are you? The 1984 Tigers WS win was all the sweeter for those who experienced the building from 1975-1983. Losing is part of life. We can get used to it or try again.
i'll focus on one point, and preface it with many here know our house has a lot of kids and they are all athletes, including college athletes for those old enough to be in college so far. having your kids play sports is also a big part of learning how to deal with tough results.
the main answer is: you move on to the next thing, the next objective, the next event. that might be walking to your car in the parking lot, planning where you're going to get chow or fuel on the way home, buying a souvenir, whatever. you might have some discussion of the game but not some rabid debriefing filled with intense emotions. you put one foot in front of the other and go on to the next task. and as your kids see you process that loss, that's how they will learn to do it, too. a saying in our house is 'more is caught than taught', meaning, your kids learn much more from how you behave as opposed to how you tell them to behave.
example: when that one failed punt happened against sparty we were all watching. i have a distinct memory of the espn score changing right after they tumbled into the endzone, i turned the TV off immediately (no need to watch replays), and said 'barn chores', and off we went to do the next thing. i'm sure i muttered a few 4-letter words under my breath and that i wasn't overly chipper for the next hour or so, but i/we/you just do the next thing and keep moving forward. it was an event that we collectively have absolutely no ability to impact and is completely out of our control so no lamenting on our part is or was going to effect the outcome.
Thank you Niels. I appreciate your description of the difference in emotional direction between playing sports with and against real people that you encounter physically, even just back yard pickup games, vs. watching sports with athletes that are distant from our day to day reality. Valuable stuff
Thanks everyone for the thoughtful comments and kind words. It’s nice to know I’m not the only person who, one way or another, has faced similar issues.
A quick update: On Friday I saw my eldest after school and asked how he was doing. He said “Oh I’m fine! My friend (UM kid who went with us) and I talked about how unfair the refs were”
So I guess that’s kind of a good thing?
INSERT SHRUG EMOJI here.
We didn’t go to the final yesterday, although my eldest initially expressed some interest in going since “it’s a lot less stressful when your team is not in it”. I agreed with that but I don’t think he thought through the fact that we might be watching the team that beat UM win the whole thing (which is what happened).
In any case they were very excited about Portillo coming back, who they think is the next coming of Dominic Háček, partly because he is from the country we have a lot of ties to. I’ll let that ride until our first Yost trip in the fall.…..
Thanks for a good read on a topic that's been a big part of my life. I'm probably the biggest "fan" in my house, that is, the one who reacts the most emotionally to my team's outcome. My husband gets upset for literally moments and then moves on. My son, who is a college athlete, doesn't do the fan thing at all. He never did. He liked certain teams but didn't take it personally when they lost. He shrugged his shoulders and moved on. But he was incredibly hard on himself when he lost or didn't perform. My take has always been it's genes that determine how we respond to this somewhat primitive emotion. I think you can teach better behavior in the face of the loss for sure. But that deep down feeling of anger/loss/humiliation/vengeance (for me, it's in that order) is hard-wired.
Interesting point, Wendy; I'm sure there is a genetic component to all this, and then we ask ourselves to what extent nurture can influence nature. We have to hope, and I believe, that there is at least a bit of room for education to have an effect here.
It started very early with my son, around age 4. We were at a friend's house and he lost at the board game Mousetrap. He got so upset (crying, tantrum) that I had to take him home. Then he started playing sports and he went through 8 or 9 years of not being able to control his emotions when he didn't perform up to his own standards. He didn't get mad at anyone else for not performing, just himself. He eventually grew out of it/learned how to control it. My brother was the same way, as was his son. So I think there is a genetic component to this, a personality trait. They all grew out of it, but not without parental guidance. It wasn't easy for this mother to watch, I can tell you that!
In other posts, I've said this before, but parenthood is another name for regret. When you protect your kids one day, that protection can be a vulnerability the next. There is no one path.
Encouraging my kids to participate and compete was helpful; modeling behavior and effort and taking losses in stride, all of which you talk about here much more eloquently than I could, is the best policy.
The Circus Maximus and Hippodrome featured fandom that far exceeds our modern experience. Fans would eat horse manure to intuit races, and the Nika revolt in Constantinople resulted in the death of over 30,000 people in the Hippodrome (~10% of the total population)... so there's that.
Thanks for this diary. Go Blue!
Thanks for posting your excellent personal essay. Fans tend to have a mindset that's fixed on their own emotional reward. Winning feels exhilarating; losing feels bad. But sports participation isn't a zero sum game. Winning feels good in the moment, but losing is a growth opportunity—a chance to get better. Furthermore, win or lose, you get to start the next game with a blank slate.
Thank you for sharing! This was a great read!
I'm in the current process of trying to teach my kids about losing and taking losses. My daughter is 9 and my son is 5. My son sees what his sister does and "act accordingly". So, when my daughter loses in a game, she gets upset and cries, so he does the same. I tried to tell my daughter that losing happens, and that it's pretty much going to happen to the best of us.
Unfortunately, she doesn't want to listen but I think that's because she's 9 and doesn't really take the whole giving advice thing as she should. I do hope that she will get it quicker than I did.
April 16th, 2022 at 10:49 AM ^
Read this as "Punching through child's first gut punch loss" and Ii was very concerned.
When I was a kid, I felt emotions so strongly, a bad game from my team could ruin my entire month. Good job being on the ball as a parent.
An amazing read. I had to hold my daughter on NYE when Michigan played Georgia, this season was her first knowing exactly what was going on with Michigan and she was so into it. She even got a "lucky" shirt and every Saturday me and her had to wear it. I didn't wear it on the day of the state game to go get my hair cut and she was livid. But on NYE we was fully decked out. And by halftime, my 7 year old daughter was distraught. It was a tough night for her little heart but she learned the phrase "There's always next year"
Way to make it happen on the bases!!!!
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